Product Description
Killing Time is the story of Paul Feyerabend's life. Finished only weeks before his death in 1994, it is the self-portrait of one of this century's most original and influential intellectuals.

Trained in physics and astronomy, Feyerabend was best known as a philosopher of science. But he emphatically was not a builder of theories or a writer of rules. Rather, his fame was in powerful, plain-spoken critiques of "big" science and "big" philosophy. Feyerabend gave voice to a radically democratic "epistemological anarchism:" he argued forcefully that there is not one way to knowledge, but many principled paths; not one truth or one rationality but different, competing pictures of the workings of the world."Anything goes," he said about the ways of science in his most famous book, Against Method. And he meant it.

Here, for the first time, Feyerabend traces the trajectory that led him from an isolated, lower-middle-class childhood in Vienna to the height of international academic success. He writes of his experience in the German army on the Russian front, where three bullets left him crippled, impotent, and in lifelong pain.He recalls his promising talent as an operatic tenor (a lifelong passion), his encounters with everyone from Martin Buber to Bertolt Brecht, innumerable love affairs, four marriages, and a career so rich he once held tenured positions at four universities at the same time.

Although not written as an intellectual autobiography, Killing Time sketches the people, ideas, and conflicts of sixty years.Feyerabend writes frankly of complicated relationships with his mentor Karl Popper and his friend and frequent opponent Imre Lakatos, and his reactions to a growing reputation as the "worst enemy of science."Amazon.com Review
If you view the Philosophy professor as a stodgy oldcurmudgeon wrapped up in theories, and forever spouting eminentlysensible nonsense, Paul Feyerabend's autobiography may change yourview. Then again, it may not, because he held the same viewhimself. Iconoclast, non-conformist and brilliant philosopher,Feyerabend reveals his roots through unadorned, journalist-style prose-- his childhood in Vienna, his aspirations to sing opera, his stintin World War II as a German soldier, his time with Popper in London,his love affairs, marriage and even a little philosophy for goodmeasure. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

A beautiful lost time
Interesting thinkers like Feyerabend were nourished by an intellectual culture that valued non-conformists. For example:

"During the first plenary session [of a seminar at Alpbach] I almost fell off my chair; so much nonsense, so many errors! Didn't the learned gentlemen know anything? I made notes for the discussion, hoping to straighten them out. At last the lectures were over I raised my hand. The chairman chose one Eminent Person, and that Eminent Person spoke. He chose another Eminent Person, and that Eminent Person too spoke at great length without saying anything. Finally it was my turn. ... Ernesto Grassi and Thure von Üxküll had discussed truth in a way that struck me as empty rhapsodizing. I let them have it. ... When the discussion was over and I moved into the sun, I suddenly had Popper at my side: 'Let's take a walk,' he said. ... Popper talked---about music, the dangers of Beethoven, the Wagnerian disaster; he criticized me for having mentioned Reichenbach's 'interphenomena' (from his book on quantum mechanics), and he suggested we use the familiar du form of address. In the evening he took me to a select meeting with Bertalanffy, Karl Rahner, von Hayek, and other dignitaries; I, a mere student, and a beginner at that, had been found worthy of participating in their sublime debates!" (pp. 71-72)

The same intellectual culture also appreciated teaching as the intellectual and honourable activity that it is, rather than a "teaching load" which is how the anti-intellectual charlatan professors of today regard it. For example:

"My interest in physics and astronomy came from an excellent physics teacher at our school, Professor Oswald Thomas, a well-known figure in Viennese education. Once a month, Thomas assembled about two thousand people in a large meadow outside Vienna, turned off the streetlights and explained the constellations. ... He also gave lectures at his office and at the university. I attended most of them and assisted him in various ways. On my thirteenth birthday I was permitted to give a lecture of my own. 'Two minutes,' said Professor Thomas; I had to be removed after ten." (p. 28)

In Feyerabend's generation this spirit was upheld by professor attending each other's lectures and engaging in debates. When Feyerabend "gave my usual philosophy of science course" at Zürich, several professor from other departments attended, including van der Waerden, who "would interrupt and raise objections, and we would have a lively exchange" (p. 157). At the LSE "Imre Lakatos ... came to every lecture" and did the same (p. 128).

It seems to me that Feyerabend squandered this entire inheritance. The heritage is crucially imprtant: we saw Feyerabend assert the importance of Thomas, and of his time in Alpbach where he met Popper and had other fruitful intellectual exchanges as a young student he writes that "This was the most decisive step of my life. I would not be where I am today, with the pensions I am drawing, [and] the ambiguous reputation I seem to possess, ... had I not accepted" (p. 70).

But Feyerabend failed to be a Thomas or Popper for the next generation. Broken down to a depression following the "chauvinism, illiteracy, and intolerance" (p. 148) with which his book Against Method was met, Feyerabend lapsed into a rather disgustingly content egotism. He wines about his "teaching load" (p. 156), he cheers at being relieved of office hours (p. 158) and at having a student run his seminar ("I accepted at once---the less I had to do the better"; p. 160), etc. No wonder, then, that no Feyerabends are being produced today, since he broke with such arrogance the precious tradition that by his own admission had made his own career possible.

The life behind the ideas
This book is a very quick read. Even so, it is painfully honest, and reveals the quirky, often confused and more often restless man that lies behind the formidable iconoclast who penned Against Method. It reveals a man often misunderstood and taken to be a philosophical superhero, even though he never saw himself in this way. Not that he wasn't a genius of sorts; he would just rather have been singing in the theater or watching romantic films all day than plugging away at some article. He hated the politics of the academy, and shied away from his responsibilities as often as his administrators would allow. He seems to have lived a number of lives: an officer in the Third Reich; a budding singer of the theater; a philosophical superstar; an introvert and bookworm; a world-traveler who never really felt at home anywhere; finally, a man who only learned what true love was in the last decade of his life, upon meeting his fourth (and final) wife, Grazia. Despite his many accomplishments, he ends his beautiful account by saying that he wishes only to leave a legacy of love--not of books or abstract ideas or anything like like--just love.

An excerpt:

"I'm a little more intelligent than I used to be; I've learned a few tricks, I'm better balanced, emotionally (though this balance still leaves much to be desired); in short, I'm in a much better position to start my life than I was only a decade ago--but I'm at the end of it, give or take a few years. Five years, perhaps, ten years if I'm lucky. That gives me pause. And why? Not because I would like to live forever, and certainly not because of the important books and papers that might remain unwritten, but because I would
like to grow old with Grazia, because I would like to love her old and wrinkled face as I am loving her youthful face today, because I would like to support her in her troubles and to rejoice with her in her happy times. These thoughts, which start clamoring for attention whenever I think about the rest of my life, make it clear to me that there are strong inclinations after all, that they are not about abstract things such as solitude or intellectual achievements but about a live human being, and that at long last I have learned what it means to love somebody."

[...]

"I would not want to die now that I have finally got my act together--in my private as well as my professional life. [...] These may be the last days.We are taking them one at a time...My concern is that after my departure something remains of me, not papers, not final philosophical declarations, but love...Whatever happens now, our small family can live forever--Grazia, me and our love.That is what I would like to happen, not intellectual survival but the survival of love."

Sadly, Paul died only a weeks after penning these words.The incompleteness of what his mature reflections consider to be the most important legacy of his life is at once both sad and instructive.He would, no doubt, wish us to marvel at the vaporous quality of our lives, and to seize upon the chances we have right here and now to live full and to love fiercely what lay before us.

Scènes de la vie de bohème
In his book `Reason and Culture', Ernest Gellner points his finger at certain philosophers of science for undermining reason. One of the culprits is Paul Feyerabend.
This autobiography is very revealing indeed. It gives an in depth view of Feyerabend's eventful life, his difficult character, his fierce philosophical battles, his profound (physical and intellectual) loves and his (self-) inflicted deceptions.
As young soldier, he was physically heavily marked by World War II, but astonishingly his fighting spirit was enhanced. On the other hand, was this experience not a main reason for his deep pessimism: `Me? A family? Children? Not on this planet!' He called himself an `icy egotist'. All his life he had violent outburst of inner rage: `We shall act in a barbaric way. We shall punish, kill, meet violence with violence.'
During the war, he was lived, as Nietzsche said: `the aims of Nazism - I hardly knew what they were.' Already then for him, `a clean moral vision implies simplifications and acts of cruelty and injustice.'
After the war, he had to choose between a career as a professional singer (he had a beautiful voice and loved opera) or as a scientist. He became a philosopher of science.
But now the intellectual caste became the target of his violent attacks: `intellectuals prepare a New Age of ignorance, darkness and slavery.' His main foe was the man he saw as the new POP(p)E(r) of philosophy.
Overreactions and exaggerations made him even return to animism: `two types of tumors to be removed - philosophy of science and general philosophy (ethics, epistemology etc.) ... Nor is there one way of knowing, science. There are many such ways, and before they were ruined by Western civilization, they were effective in the sense that they kept people alive and made their existence comprehensible.'??
His anger culminated in his best known book `Against Method', called by his caste `anything goes'. Already the title is a provocation. It provoked an avalanche of devastating reviews which traumatized him deeply. He defends himself: `I never denigrated reason, only some petrified and tyrannical versions of it.'
After meeting the love of his life, the rebel (sometimes without a cause) became less caustic, and even wanted children.

All in all, this book is a fascinating read.

moving
One of the most moving, insightful, and honest autobiographies I've ever read. Unduly influenced by the standard ignorant rap on Against Method, I was also very surprised. Get it, especially if you have a background in math, physics, philosophy, or even music.

An awesome spiritual odyssee
This is a slim volume, barely 200 pages, but it charts an awesome spiritual odyssee. Paul Feyerabend - enfant terrible of late 20th century philosophy - looked ruthlessly in the mirror and painted an unadorned picture of himself. At the end of his life, he painfully recognised that its course had been shaped by absences, rather than by specific events or, for that matter, ideas: absence of purpose, of content, of a focused interest, absence of moral character, absence of warmth and of social relationships.

Only when Feyerabend approached the final fifteen years of his life and settled as a professor in the philosophy of science in Zürich - after having lectured four decades at Anglo-American universities - he started to relax. And eventually, a woman came and set things right. In 1983 he met the Italian physicist Grazia Borrini for the first time. Five years later they married. His relationship with Mrs. Borrini must have been the single most important event in Feyerabend's life. Reading his autobiography is an experience akin to listening to Sibelius' tone-poem 'Nightride and Sunrise': after 1983 the colours change dramatically and his prose is infused with warmth and immense gratefulness. It is a delight to read his rapt eulogies on the companion of the last decade of his life, on his most fortunate discovery of true love and friendship. Indeed, although Feyerabend is not interested in 'spoiling' his autobiography with an extensive reiteration of his philosophical positions, there are a few messages he clearly wants to drive home. The central role in life of love and friendship is one of them. Without these "even the noblest achievements and the most fundamental principles remain pale, empty and dangerous" (p. 173). Yet, Feyerabend clearly wants us to see that this love "is a gift, not an achievement" (p. 173). It is something which is subjected neither to the intellect, nor to the will, but is the result of a fortunate constellation of circumstances.

The same applies to the acquisition of 'moral character'. This too "cannot be created by argument, 'education' or an act of will." (p.174). Yet, it is only in the context of a moral character - something which Feyerabend confesses to having only acquired a trace of after a long life and the good fortune of having met Grazia - that ethical categories such as guilt, responsibility and obligation acquire a meaning. "They are empty words, even obstacles, when it is lacking." (p.174) (Consequently, he did not think himself responsible for his behavior during the Nazi period).

Contrary to someone like Karl Kraus, Feyerabend seems to think that men, at least as long as they have not acquired moral character, are morally neutral, whilst ideas are not. A question which remains, of course, is who is to be held responsible for intellectual aberrations and intentional obfuscation if this character is only to be acquired by an act of grace, an accidental constellation of circumstances.

There is an enigmatic passage in the autobiography which may shed light on this important problem. After having seen a performance of Shakespeare's Richard II, in which the protagonist undoes himself of all his royal insigna, thereby relinquishing not just "a social role but his very individuality, those features of his character that separated him from other", Feyerabend notes that the "dark, unwieldy, clumsy, helpless creature that appeared seemed freer and safer, despite prison and death, than what he had left behind." (p. 172) It prompts him to the insight that "the sum of our works and/or deeds does not constitute a life. These . . . are like debris on an ocean . . . They may even form a solid platform, thus creating an illusion of universality, security, and permanence. Yet the security and the permanence can be swept away by the powers that permitted them to arise." (p. 172) These ideas do not exactly solve the question about moral responsibility, but they do suggest a tragic 'Lebensgefühl' - an acknowledgment of the fact that the spheres of reason, order and justice are terribly limited and that no progress in our science and technical resources will change their relevance - which seems to underpin Feyerabends very earthbound philosophy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent book, two retitles
This excellent book has been retitled twice.The titlesin chronological order are :

1.Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists

2.Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism

3. Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult

Author is David C. Stove. See the third title for my review.

This Book Has Been Retitled
This wonderful book is available under a new title (changed to help it sell better).The new title is "Anything Goes." ... Read more

Product Description
This is a critical study of the Incommensurability Thesis of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, that different scientific theories may be incommensurable because of conceptual variance. While critical of the thesis and of the arguments for it, the author aims to acknowledge the views of his opponents. This study develops a version of the standard "referential" response to the thesis that conceptually variant theories may be comparable by means of referential overlaps of their terms. A modified causal theory of reference is adopted, which allows a reference-determining role to descriptions and reference-fixing to occur after original baptisms. On this basis, it is argued that there may be failure of translation between the sub-languages employed by theories. The claim that theories may fail to be translatable is defended against Davidson and Putnam's thesis that the idea of untranslatability is incoherent. It is also argued that the thesis of translation failure between theories can be maintained on the basis of a realist commitment. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Naive attempt at a"deflation" of incommensurability
Comparison in terms of reference. A difference in sense does not necessarily imply a difference in reference. Overlap of reference is all that is needed for objective comparison in the sense that one sentence can preclude another from being true in virtue of referential relations without the sentences sharing any words or being of the same language/theory. This potentially enables objective comparison even in the absence of any deductive relation between the sentences themselves. But is there such referential overlap? Surely the answer is generally no if one thinks in terms of a description theory of reference (as Kuhn and Feyerabend seem to do e.g. in their discussions of Newtonian versus Einsteinian mass: there is no referential overlap because nothing can satisfy both descriptions). But this proves nothing because the description theory of reference has been discredited independently of the issue of incommensurability. Its problems include the facts that it makes most scientific terms not refer at all (e.e. Bohr's electron) and that descriptions are generally incomplete and fallible (e.g., descriptions notwithstanding, we may still recognise a three-legged albino tiger as a tiger). An alternative is the causal theory of reference (Kripke, Putnam), where reference is established as terms are introduced and then remain fixed. Entities may be defined ostensively (in simple cases) or in terms of the observable effects it causes (for theoretic terms such as electricity). Such definitions are not formal; rather the speakers will infer their"causal" essence for themselves. Thus there may be referential continuity without descriptive continuity. But the causal theory goes too far: it precludes reference change altogether (and, even worse, it seems to equate phlogiston and oxygen). To avoid this we must allow re-naming ceremonies as well as the initial naming-ceremony. It may seem that this leaves us where we started: no referential continuity. But Sankey thinks he has a way out in insisting that the only defining property of a theoretical term is its causal role. This (supposedly) separates phlogiston and oxygen and leaves the door open for (non-causal) descriptive change without change in reference. This is all extremely sketchy and it is quite impossible to see how it is supposed to apply for example in the case of Newtonian versus Einsteinian mass.

Untranslatability. This is a detour from Sankey's main argument. A perfect translation preserves extension in all possible worlds (cf. "unicorn"), i.e., identity of reference determinations. Translation may fail in two ways, as may be illustrated by the medieval concept of impetus. Its reference determination as "a force causing uniform motion in a straight line" is not permissible in Newtonian physics, and so translation fails. But impetus was also defined by ostension. From the point of view of Newtonian physics this was a separate "token" of impetus, and one which would translate as momentum. But faithful translation is still impossible since it would have to convey the presumed identity of these two reference determinations. Nevertheless, this does not preclude communication, as some have argued, because "we can learn a language ... from scratch, as a child learns them, without the detour through our native tongue" (Feyerabend, p. 113). Nor is the intranslatability thesis incoherent because Kuhn's and Feyerabend's proofs of it involves doing what they say is impossible, namely expressing ancient scientific terms in modern language. This objection misses the point sice scientific language is a sublanguage of the total language; expressability in the total language English proves nothing, for this is not the language into which translation fails.

Kuhn on reference. Kuhn said in Structure that Newtonian mass and Einstenian mass were "by no means identical." Sankey claims that this "seems to rule out common reference altogether" (p. 155; I disagree). He then claims that this is absurd because "neither term can refer successfully if it in fact fails to refer to stereotypical masses" (p. 155; it is of course naive to think that there is such a thing as "stereotypical mass"). To remove this alleged absurdity it is suggested that Kuhn's "referent" be read as "putative referent" (p. 159). Taken in conjunction with the description theory of reference to which Kuhn seems committed (in his proof that the two masses differ), this has, according to Sankey, "a number of objectionable features" because it "appears to yield a mistaken analysis of the relation between the two concepts of mass" (p. 160). E.g.: "it implies that Newton's theory cannot be contradicted by denying that mass is a conserved quantity. [Proof:] Given that the Newtonian concept of mass is a concept which is conserved, to deny that mass is conserved is ipso facto not to speak of the same kind of mass." And I suppose x=0 does not contradict x=1 because we are "ipso facto" talking about two different x's? Second example: "if Newtonian 'mass' only refers to mass if it is conserved, then certain sorts of experimental results are ruled out altogether. For example, it would be impossible to discover empirically that the mass referred to in Newtonian explanations of physical motion is convertible with energy." There is nothing "objectionable" or "mistaken" about this. On the contrary, it would be very objectionable if Newtonian physics did not rule out any experimental results. More importantly: it is precisely this possibility of an experimental decision between Newtonian and Einsteinian mechanics that Sankey wants to claim that his reference-based approach enables. Sankey is thus condemning Kuhn's approach as "objectionable" and "mistaken" precisely because it precludes the conclusion that he wants to draw.

In his conclusion, Sankey claims to have "deflated" incommensurability: "We have found no reason to take incomparability of content as the inevitable result of conceptual disparity between theories. ... The various referential overlap relations which may obtain between theories ensure that appropriately related statements from such theories may be compared with respect to agreement; so that empirical evidence may support one while disconfirming the other" (p. 221). But of course no one has ever claimed that conceptual disparity *must* lead to incomparability of content, only that it in fact does so in a number of actual cases. It is utterly ridiculous to pretend to have "deflated" this claim by asserting that it *may* be false. Vague allusions to "various referential overlap relations" prove nothing but Sankey's dilettantism. Sankey never clarifies what these referential overlap relations are supposed to be, why we should believe that they generally obtain in scientific revolution, or how they are instantiated in specific examples. On the contrary, as we saw above, Sankey seems to be operating with the extremely simplistic notion that either "mass" applies to a rock or it does not. The actual state of affairs is surely much more complex: the concepts of Newtonian and Einsteinian mass both try to pick out different but related properties of a rock. Whether this relation translates into a referential overlap which allows objective test is far from clear. ... Read more

Product Description
Every philosopher of science, and every student of thephilosophy of science, has heard of Paul Feyerabend: the iconoclastwho supposedly asserted that science is not rational, nor objective,but is characterised by anarchism, relativism, subjectivism and power.In this book it is argued that this picture of Feyerabend is false.Though Feyerabend was an iconoclast, his destructive philosophy wasalso creative. Feyerabend was deeply critical of a particular theoryof scientific rationality, herein labelled 'Rationalism' -characterised as the algorithmic application of universal, necessary,atemporal rules - but he did not completely reject the idea ofscientific rationality. It is argued that Feyerabend implicitlysupported an alternative theory of rationality, herein labelledtightrope-walking rationality, characterised as the context-sensitivebalancing of inherently irreconcilable values. The first half of the book deals with the entrenched misunderstandingsof Feyerabend's philosophy that have arisen through a lack ofappreciation of the target of Feyerabend's criticisms. The second halfof the book brings together the positive elements to be found inFeyerabend's work, and presents these elements as a coherentalternative conception of scientific rationality. This book is of interest to all philosophers of science, students ofthe philosophy of science, and anyone interested in science and therationality of science. It constitutes the first book-length study ofFeyerabend's post-1970 philosophy and will be an invaluable resourcefor anyone who wants to understand the views of one of the mostinfluential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. ... Read more